Saturday, January 1, 2011

We use Sun/Oracle's Fishworks (7000) ZFS Storage Appliances to store our Oracle archive logs and to replicate them to our DR datacenter.

We generate more than 2TB of archive logs per day, and ZFS' compression helps knock that down to a somewhat more manageable 500GB a day. Initially we were using project-based replication which was easy to configure, but unfortunately there was not enough parallelism to keep up with our change rate.

Sun suggested setting up replications for each share (we have 16 shares per database cluster) to improve throughput. It's worked well, but the user interface didn't provide an overview of replication status.

Fortunately, the CLI can be scripted using JavaScript, so it was easy to loop over the projects and shares and extract the replication status.

To run the script, just ssh to the appliance and redirect stdin from the script: